Lions and Tigers and Bears, OH MY !!

When my daughter was little, she watched The Wizard of Oz until the tape literally wore out and broke so I’ve seen it probably a hundred times, maybe more when you include the times back in the 70's when it was on broadcast TV once a year…once, and you planned your whole week around it ("broadcast TV"?... what's that?).

Don't get me wrong, it's a classic and after 84 years, still holds up.

In 35 years doing valuations, M&A, venture capital, private equity, and consulting, I’ve LONG-ago reached the point where I can look at a deal, a company, an industry and have a pretty good sense of what might happen down the road.

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But look, I don’t have a crystal ball and I'm no soothsayer. I'm more like Professor Marvel back there in Kansas; quite simply, I’ve seen some things and I've met some witches - good witches and bad witches.

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Working with middle market companies, most of them owned by individuals or families, I’ve seen some of the issues that inevitably come up. The confluence of family and business can turn dysfunctional on both fronts, but it doesn’t take a wizard to figure that out – just someone objective who has seen it all before.

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I’ve worked on deals where I’ve literally told my client what the other side will say and it happened as if it were scripted – “they're going to say this” or “they're going to try to renegotiate that” – and afterward clients ask me “how did you know?”. After a while, you just do. If she's got green skin and rides a broom, she's probably not your friend, just saying.

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I like working with companies where the founders are like Dorothy, all full of energy and ready to take on the world. They’re dancing down the road, they’re off to see the Wizard, and they see the Emerald City in the distance but not always the things that could happen on the way. So when I get involved, I see potential problems like leapfrogging technologies, supply chain issues, difficulties with scalability, time management, employee scarcity, and some of the other stuff that I’ve seen a million times.

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I’m kind of a “human spoiler alert” but it’s better to know what’s ahead so you can get your team moving down the [yellow brick] road and plan for it.

In short; ?

• I know about the cyclone…
• I know about the Wicked Witch…and
• I’ve handled the Flying Monkeys.

Now, just for fun, here are some words of wisdom from people who aren’t me:

• "Doubt grows with knowledge." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
• " What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?" - Alfred Hitchcock
• "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes" - Oscar Wilde